Regular Expressions with Hyphens seem broken when using Boundaries?

Question

Am I being dense, or do boundaries seem to break the matching of hyphens in JavaScript regular expressions?

var string1 = "example words";

/\bexample\b/.test(string1); // true (all good)

var string2 = "-example -words";

/\b-example\b/.test(string2); // false (confusion)

Maybe I've misinterpreted the boundary behaviour?

Escaping the hyphen doesn't seem to help either...

Answer 1

It is because \b is word boundary and - or hyphen is already considered a non word character. You can use this regex insstead:

/-example\b/.test('-example -words');
true

Answer 2

The issue is that - is not a "word character". \b matches the boundary between a word character and a non-word character. The space before the - does not match this definition.